This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.
Maoist Internationalist Movement

PROTESTORS RALLY AGAINST U.$. TROOPS IN THE PHILIPPINES

15th Anniversary of the Mendiola Massacre Commemorated

LOS ANGELES, January 22, 2002 -- An Asian drum performance, poetry reading, testimonies from survivors and statements of solidarity with the ongoing peasant struggle in the Philippines opened a BAYAN International USA-organized commemoration on the 15th anniversary of the Mendiola Massacre. On January 22, 1987, "30,000 peasants and sympathetic students and workers marched to the Presidential Palace to demand that the u.$.-Aquino regime implement its vague promises for land reform. Hundreds of police and Philippine marines stopped the protestors near the Mendiola Bridge and then fired upon them for more than a minute. The police and marines shot many of the demonstrators in the back or in the head, killing 13 and wounding 105."(1) To this day, victims and survivors have not received an apology or restitution for the murders. This year MIM, RAIL and SLALA comrades joined about 30 people who rallied at the Philippine Consulate in Los Angeles to demand an end to U.$. military intervention in the Philippines. The rally was organized by BAYAN and other organizations linked to the national democratic movement in the Philippines. The U.$. recently sent hundreds of troops to the island of Mindanao in the southern Philippines, under the guise of helping the puppet Macapagal-Arroyo regime fight the bandits known as Abu Sayaaf. (Philippine military intelligence and the CIA are rumored to have created this goon squad; some Abu Sayaaf commanders served with the CIA-backed Mujahedin in Afghanistan.) U.$. troops will participate in so-called "military exercises" in a combat zone, training and advising Philippine soldiers.(2) Fifteen years after the martyrs at Mendiola sacrificed their lives in a struggle for genuine land reform, the United Snakes is (again) sending troops, money and equipment to protect the landed interests of Dole and other multi-national corporations in the Philippines. Article 18, Section 25 of the Philippine constitution explicitly prohibits foreign troops on Philippine soil: "After the expiration in 1991 of the Agreement between the Republic of the Philippines and the United States of America concerning military bases, foreign military bases, troops, or facilities shall not be allowed in the Philippines except under a treaty..."(3) The U.$.-Macapagal- Arroyo regime is using the "war on terrorism" as an excuse to violate this constitutional provision, as Abu Sayaaf has been named by the U.$. as a terrorist organization with links to Osama Bin Laden. The presence of U.$. "advisors" will position the reactionary regime to step up its repression of the revolutionary and nationalist forces, led by the Communist Party of the Philippines, who are fighting a people's war for national liberation. Organizers showed a video of the Mendiola massacre, which clearly shows heavily armed police and military firing on unarmed peasants, and facilitated a discussion about the event's significance. Following the ouster of the reactionary Marcos regime in the mid-1980s, peasants had come to the presidential palace in January 1987 to demand that then- president Corazon Aquino deliver on her campaign promise to give land to poor farmers. Aquino, herself a wealthy landowner who exempted her own 8,000-hectare plantation from her phony land reform plans, responded with military force and the backing of the imperialist united snakes. The video explained that the majority of the population in the Philippines lives in the countryside and works in agriculture, mostly as tenant farmers. Peasants are forced to pay exorbitant rents to big landlords. Multi-national corporations, protected by U.$. imperialism, grow crops for export, not local consumption. BAYAN organizers emphasized that this was just one massacre in an ongoing struggle for land and national liberation. MIM calls upon all anti- imperialists to oppose all U.$. military intervention in the Philippines. On this important anniversary of the massacre of peasant organizers at Mendiola, we emphasize the link between national liberation and land reform. U.$.A. out of the Philippines!

Notes: 1. MIM Notes 132, 15 February 1997. 2. Associated Press, 23 January 2002. 3. Philippine Constitution, www.chanrobles.com/article18.htm.